In a well deserved extended run at the Brand Library & Art Center in Glendale, the mixed-media exhibition “thread/bare” features a stunning collection of work by six women artists.
An expansion of an exhibition with the same name held in Camarillo last year, the show combines traditional mixed media style with sculpture and two large-scale installation pieces.The exhibition includes work by artists Nurit Avesar, Elana Kundell, Susan Kurland, Janet Neuwalder, Sigrid Orlet, and Peggy Pownall.
Each artist’s style is unique, but the six are all thematically joined in an exploration that lays “bare” the power of creativity.
Peggy Pownall’s work uses circular patterns, collage, and photographs in a study of self-reflection. Pownall says “To me, the special nature of this exhibit lies in its strong thread of continuity based in the artists’ similar perceptions. My work draws its content and character from internal sources, personal memories and an almost compulsive need to sort through life’s chaos to create order and clarity. My methods and materials are born out of the need to find an expression of my themes, and as with all the artists in this show, they are unique to my work.”
Susan Kurland creates plexiglass pieces and sculptures that pay tribute to detailed needlework, a traditional female art. “I’ve come to realize and embrace the materials I now use and draw from my training and practice as a seamstress which continues to influence my practice as an artist.” Kurland combines conventional and domestic materials in her art. “To a certain degree being an artist does change how I see things. In training to be an artist, one learns to look at art with a discerning eye, comparing and evaluating; but all humans perceive our world differently even given the same situation.”
Sigrid Orlet uses burlap, dried plants, and traditional painting to convey a deeply dimensional quality in her art. Orlet notes “As a human being, I discovered that I could visually express that which I can’t ‘language’ in any other way. Creative process is the exploration of a pathless land. This exhibit is unique in that a group of women committed to a process of honest creative inquiry. Acting individually, we returned a body of work that vibrates with the colors, textures, and forms of living life on familial, societal, and global levels.” To Orlet, being an artist is “all about committing to the creative process. And, just like any other serious commitment, this relationship challenges us on many different levels. Art-making is one big life lesson, a lesson that fills me with wonder and humility.”
Elana Kundell creates stunning abstract landscapes that are rooted in the concrete. “My work stems from a fascination with color – its luminosity, instability and relationships, and especially its emotional immediacy. In recent work, I’ve been thinking about the nature of experience, memory, and creativity. These paintings are a sort of meditation in which layers of experience form a visceral and sensual new reality.” Working in oil paint and charcoal, Kundell says her work “alludes to the threading of experience, emotion, relationships and memory, and to the process of making the imaginary real.”
Nurit Avesar creates patterned figurative paintings and portraits, layering mixed media. She describes her work as being “about migration and the effect of cultural legacies. I start each piece by painting on paper. Next I paste the painting onto a canvas, sand it, tear apart some of it and than collage over the stressed surface fragments of old paintings. I also apply rust, thread, cheese- cloth, paint, and graphite. I use destruction as a means of creativity. The final image is very different than the original painting.” She essentially recycles her painting into new images.
“I express the ideas of the interaction of history with the present, as well as my experience as an immigrant, piecing together a multilayer new identity.”
Artist Janet Neuwalder uses clay and mixed media in her pieces. “I see my contribution to the exhibition as showing how the specific media of clay combined with mixed media materials, parallels nature’s and our own growth and transformation.” She says that her art “allows me to take in every part, every moment of the world we live in on all different levels, engaging all senses. For me all of the sights, sounds, smells become potential seeds, or stars, beacons that at any time may co-mingle.”
Curator Yoram Gil, describes “thread/bare” as “maybe the best collection of mature raw and new talent to emerge into the LA art scene in recent years. The diversity and uniqueness of each artist is profound and stunning. You can really sense the friendship, care, and affection of all the participating artists. There is something very special about this show.”
All photos by L. Aviva Diamond